From Catholic News Service

Aid agency: China, N. Korea fail to respect rights

By Carol Glatz, Catholic News Service

ROME (CNS) -- While totalitarian regimes such as China and North Korea still fail to respect a person's freedom to worship, religious liberty is also threatened by democratic governments that display a "hyperactive secular attitude," a Catholic aid agency report said.

Aid to the Church in Need, a Catholic organization funding religious projects in 145 countries, released its annual report on religious freedom at a press conference June 27 in Rome. The 423-page report compiles information directly from the churches the aid agency assists, news articles, official government documents and human rights organizations.

When it comes to suppressing or restricting religious communities that have not received government approval, China "remains at the top of the list of persecutors" along with Myanmar, Laos, Vietnam and North Korea, the report said.

One of the panelists presenting the 2006 report, Father Bernardo Cervellera, who heads the Rome-based missionary news agency AsiaNews, said the situation of freedom of religion in China was still "very ambiguous" and "contradictory."

On the one hand, he said, the government is responding to international pressure to promote human rights by passing laws granting new rights to some religious communities. But on the other hand, while churches now have the right to own property, "the state still tries to expropriate church property," he said.

Priests, bishops and religious are periodically beaten, detained or thrown in prisons, or "lagers," he said, adding that there are still three underground Catholic bishops who have "disappeared" after police arrested them several years ago.

Whereas Catholics and unregistered Protestants can face prison sentences, members of the Falun Gong spiritual movement and Tibetan Buddhists in China "are terribly persecuted" and subjected to physical and psychological torture in concentration and torture camps, Father Cervellera said.

He said China needs to complement its booming economic growth with respect for people. "Growth without a spiritual element" can only cause further suffering and conflict, he said.

The report also said all faiths "are very often violently suffocated" in North Korea. There are no more priests or nuns in the country, the report said, and almost 300,000 Christians "have disappeared" since the communist regime came to power in 1953.

Despite constitutional guarantees of religious freedom, the report said, poverty, conflict and religious intolerance have forced Christians to flee in droves from the Palestinian territories and Iraq.

It said the Eastern Catholic community in the Palestinian territories and especially in Bethlehem "now risks extinction" while some Christian leaders estimate between 10,000-40,000 Christians have fled Iraq in just three months in 2004.

But even democratic governments can be a threat to religious freedom, the report said, when they or the country's culture display "a widespread secularist trend."

The exclusion of religion from civil life is most apparent within the European Union's institutions and its parliament, it said.

Individual European governments, like in Belgium and France, have shown a "hyperactive secular attitude" that has caused "serious controversies and restrictive provisions" against Muslims and certain religious communities.

The United States, too, is deep in debate over the separation of church and state and the place of religion in public schools is "still a cultural battlefield," it said.

However, life for Muslims in the U.S. has been "deteriorating" and is increasingly difficult, the report said. It said the number of crimes "motivated by anti-Muslim hatred in the United States has increased considerably" over the past two years.

Abuse against religious freedom exists almost everywhere, panelists said, but Father Cervellera added it was important that people living in democracies not become blase about violations in their own countries as oftentimes "reports on the economy are considered more important than reports on religion."

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